Forest? What forest? The perils of zoomed-in thinking

Photo by Gustav Gullstrand on Unsplash

October 14, 2014. Lucy sprints into her freshman history class moments before an assignment is due. She clutches her just-printed essay, its pages still warm from the printer. She slaps the essay down on the table in front of her teacher. It’s like a touchdown, but much dorkier.

Her teacher looks at the packet and frowns. “Lucy, how many pages is this?”

“Twenty!” says Lucy proudly.

“And how many pages were you asked to write?”

Lucy contemplates this. “Eight, I think?”

“Does eight equal 20?”

“No,” says Lucy. “But this isn't math class.”

Her teacher shakes her head, half exasperated, half amused. “Nice try. You need to cut 12 pages.”

Lucy is outraged, of course. Twelve pages? Twelve pages? How could she cut that much, when every word in that essay seems so utterly essential?

As Lucy bemoans her tragic fate, her friends come to the rescue, ripping the staple from the packet and attacking each page with scissors. They start scribbling feedback in the margins. Next to one section: kind of long. Next to another: this might not be interesting.

(I, Lucy, will switch to the first person now.)

This scenario repeated itself over and over during that first year of high school. I’d turn up with a ten-page essay that should have been five pages, or a 15-page paper that should have been eight. No matter how much I moaned and groaned, my utterly phenomenal, slightly tyrannical teacher wouldn’t budge.

“The page limit is the page limit, Lucy,” she’d tell me.

And I’d glare at her and mutter under my breath about modern-day despots, and then I’d return a few hours later with a shorter essay.

The teacher in question is the imitable Ali McLafferty, who kindly gave me permission to name her in this post. Ali’s classes were legendary. She made it impossible not to love history, and she cared about us far too much to hold us to low standards. Slowly and painfully—very painfully—I learned to summarize.

At the time, I didn’t know that this was an autism thing. That realization would take a few more years. Now, though, I understand that detail-oriented thinking is a classic feature of Asperger’s-type autism profiles.

My favorite analogy to explain this involves Google Maps. My default is always the maximum zoom level. For a long time, I never zoomed out. I didn’t realize that was an option.

It shows up in writing. I can write and rewrite the same sentence for what feels like an eternity, forgetting that I’ve got a whole essay to finish and that the sentence might not even make it to the final draft.

It shows up in academics. I'll start a 30-page reading and spend two hours on the very first paragraph because it's so interesting! So thought-provoking! I must highlight everything! I must write in the margins! And then all of a sudden, the evening is over, the library is closing, and I’m less than a page in.

It shows up in everyday life. Tell me to clean my room, and I'll spend four hours organizing one drawer.

I can’t see the forest for the trees. I can’t even see the tree. I’m too busy looking at branchess.

Being detail-oriented isn’t inherently bad, though. You just have to harness it If you combine the ability to zoom in with the skill of zooming out, then you can use both strategically, toggling back and forth between the small details and the big picture.

Think about this the next time you use Google Maps. Without zooming, it wouldn’t be much better than a paper version.

How do you actually learn that zooming-out skill, then? Lately, I’ve been using a straightforward algorithm that’s proven incredibly versatile. 

I start by actively looking at the big picture. Let’s say I’m writing a blog post, entirely hypothetically, of course. The goal is to finish the blog post. Great.

Then I identify constraints—maybe I’ve got two hours to do it—and set myself landmarks:

• By the 15-minute mark: 25% done with a rough draft

• By the 30-minute mark: 50% done

• By the 60-minute mark: 100% done

• By the 1.5-hour mark: finish revising

• By the 2-hour mark: finish posting

Finally, I set alarms for each of these points so I don’t have to worry about reminding myself. It’s not a perfect process—this post is taking far longer than expected—but I’m getting better and better at pacing myself.

I still scowl at the mention of Ali’s tyrannical word limits. But sometimes, tyranny is the best teacher.